CHAPTER TWO #2
"I should." His thumb moved, just slightly, along the back of her hand, and the small motion sent heat rushing up her arm that had nothing to do with his fire and everything to do with him.
"I've spent twenty-six years being good at exactly one thing, Briar.
Control. And you've been here four days, and I can already feel it slipping. "
"Maybe," she said, breath uneven, "it was never really yours to control in the first place."
Something in him broke, quiet and total, and he closed the last of the distance between them — not fast, not desperate, but slow enough that she felt every inch of the decision, slow enough that she could have stopped it if she'd wanted to.
She didn't want to.
His mouth met hers, warm and certain, and the moment it did, Briar felt something ignite low in her chest that had nothing to do with magic at all — or maybe, she thought distantly, as his free hand came up to cradle her jaw and the kiss deepened into something far less careful, it had everything to do with it.
Fire and earth, meeting the way the old stories said they weren't supposed to.
She kissed him back like she'd been waiting her whole life to be allowed to, and for one long, suspended moment, neither of them cared what it cost.
When they finally broke apart, breathing hard, foreheads still close, Kade's hand hadn't left her jaw, and hers had fisted, without her permission, in the front of his shirt.
"That," he said, voice wrecked in a way that did something dangerous to her composure, "was a very bad idea."
"Yes," Briar agreed, and didn't move away. "It was."
Neither of them moved for a long moment after that, caught in the low fire-light of a chamber that had kept dragon secrets for centuries and was apparently now keeping this one too.
It would not, Briar suspected, be the last.
Briar did not see Kade again for two full days after the kiss, and she told herself, repeatedly and without much success, that she was relieved about it.
She spent the time the way she'd spent every uncertain moment of her life — moving, doing, refusing to sit still long enough to feel anything too closely.
She explored the parts of Pyrhollow that seemed to tolerate a wolf wandering through them: the lower market tiers, where dragon merchants sold fire-glass and smoked meats and eyed her with wary curiosity instead of open hostility; the terraced gardens near the east wing, where something that looked like moonflowers grew despite the heat, stubborn and pale against all that black stone and amber light.
She did not go looking for the old training chamber. She told herself that was restraint, not cowardice.
It was on the morning of the third day that Sable found her.
Briar was in the garden, sitting on a low stone wall with her boots kicked off and her bare feet in the grass — one of the few things about Duskmere she still missed, real grass, real earth under her skin without a mountain of volcanic rock underneath it — when a shadow fell over her and she looked up to find Sable studying her with an expression of careful, controlled calculation.
"You've made quite an impression," Sable said, without preamble, "for someone who fell through a hole in the ground four days ago."
"I wasn't aware I was making an impression at all."
"Everyone in this court is aware of everything, Briar Vale.
That's rather the point of a court." Sable settled onto the wall a careful distance away, arranging her silks with the kind of precision that suggested she'd never once in her life sat down carelessly.
"Ophira tells me you nearly cracked the training yard floor in half during your assessment.
And I hear Kade personally escorted you to the old chamber beneath the hall the same evening. "
Briar kept her face as still as she could manage, years of pack politics finally proving useful for something. "He was helping me control an ability I don't understand. That's all."
"Is it." Sable's voice was mild, almost pleasant, which somehow made it worse.
"You should know, wolf, that I am not a fool, and I am not the kind of woman who wastes time being jealous over something that isn't a threat.
If Kade Ashgrove had simply escorted an injured stranger to safety, I would think nothing more of it.
But I've known Kade since we were children.
I know exactly what his face looks like when he's guarding something. "
Briar's pulse ticked up despite herself. "And what does his face look like?"
"The way it looked," Sable said, "when he came back from that chamber two nights ago."
The silence that followed felt heavier than it should have.
Briar looked down at the grass beneath her feet and said nothing, because there was nothing she could say that wouldn't make things worse, and Sable, watching her not-answer with sharp, assessing eyes, seemed to take the silence as answer enough.
"I am not going to pretend this doesn't complicate things," Sable said finally, standing, smoothing her skirts with brisk, businesslike hands.
"But understand something, Briar Vale, and understand it clearly.
This mating was never about love, on either side.
It's an alliance between houses that has been in motion since Kade and I were children — long before you fell through the ground and started unraveling things you don't understand the weight of.
If you care for him even slightly, you'll consider what it costs him to want something he isn't allowed to have. "
She left without waiting for a response, red silks catching the light as she disappeared back into the hall, and Briar sat alone in the garden for a long time afterward, feeling considerably less relieved than she had that morning.
She found Kade an hour later, on a balcony overlooking the lower tiers of the city, alone, arms braced against the black stone railing, watching the fire-globes flicker to life as evening approached.
He didn't turn when she stepped out beside him, though the faint shift in his shoulders told her he'd known she was there before she'd said a word.
"Sable spoke to you," he said. Not a question.
"She's not wrong to worry."
"No," Kade agreed, quiet, tired in a way that made something in Briar's chest ache. "She isn't."
"So what happens now?" She kept her voice level, though it cost her something to do it.
"Do we pretend the chamber didn't happen?
Do you marry her like nothing changed, and I go back to Duskmere the moment the Hollow Court clears the veil-gate breach, and we both act like two days ago was some kind of fever brought on by proximity and bad judgment? "
Kade turned to face her then, and whatever careful stillness he usually wore had cracked clean through. "Is that what you want?"
"I asked you first."
"No," he said, low and rough, and the honesty of it landed somewhere deep in her chest. "That is the last thing I want, and it terrifies me how much I don't want it, because wanting it changes nothing.
I am still my father's heir. I am still bound to an alliance that keeps three clans from tearing each other apart over old grudges neither of us started.
If I walk away from this mating, it isn't just my life I put at risk.
It's Sable's house. It's the balance this entire territory depends on. "
"Then why did you kiss me?"
"Because I have spent twenty-six years doing exactly what was expected of me," Kade said, voice breaking slightly at the edges, "and for one moment, in that chamber, with your magic answering mine like it had been waiting its whole life to be met — I forgot how to be careful.
I have never once forgotten how to be careful, Briar. Not until you."
The space between them had gone thick and charged again, the same way it had in the old chamber, heat rolling off him in slow, deliberate waves that had nothing to do with the volcanic warmth of Pyrhollow and everything to do with the way he was looking at her.
"That's a dangerous thing to admit to someone you're supposed to be sending home," she said softly.
"I know." He stepped closer, close enough that she could feel the heat of him against her skin, close enough that every careful, sensible thought in her head started to blur at the edges. "I keep telling myself I'm going to be sensible about this. I keep failing."
"Maybe," Briar said, tipping her face up toward his, breath already uneven, "you should stop trying."
For a moment neither of them moved. Kade's gaze dropped to her mouth, and Briar felt her own breath catch, felt the space between them narrow by inches without either of them seeming to decide it — his hand coming up, slow, to brush a strand of hair back from her face, fingers grazing her jaw and lingering there like he was asking a question neither of them had the courage to say out loud.
"Briar." Her name came out low, rough, barely more than an exhale.
"I know," she whispered back, and didn't move away.
The heat between them had gone thick and unbearable, the kind of silence that only exists in the half-second before two people stop pretending — and then a sharp burst of raised voices carried up from the tier below, followed by the unmistakable clang of a horn Briar hadn't heard before, three short blasts that echoed off the black stone walls of the caldera.
Kade went rigid immediately, the heat in his eyes replaced by something colder and sharper in an instant. He stepped back, putting a full arm's length between them like the last several minutes had never happened, though his jaw stayed tight, his breathing not quite even.
"That's a border alarm," he said. "Someone's breached the outer perimeter."
"Now?" Briar's pulse, already unsteady from an entirely different cause, kicked into something closer to alarm. "Breached from where?"